Earnings made by the CEOs of the FTSE 100 companies will have surpassed the median UK worker’s full-time annual salary by just before 1pm today, estimates from the High Pay Centre (HPC) have indicated.

As with last year, the latest executive pay data suggests that CEOs will have to wait until just the third working day of 2024 to surpass the annual pay of the median worker.

The calculations have been based on HPC’s analysis of the most recent CEO pay disclosures published in companies’ annual reports, combined with Government statistics showing pay levels across the UK economy.

Median FTSE 100 CEO pay, excluding pensions, currently stands at £3.81m, a level 109 times the median full-time worker’s pay of £34,963. This represents a 9.5% increase on median CEO pay levels as of March 2023, while the median worker’s pay has increased by 6%.

The HPC’s figures also indicated that anyone in the top 1% of full-time UK earners, making at least £145,000, will have overtaken the annual pay of the median full-time worker by 29 March this year.

The figures come against a backdrop of calls from leading figures in the city and big business for UK CEOs to be paid more. In December, Legal and General Investment Management adjusted its executive pay guidelines to permit firms it invests in to offer more generous incentive payments, while earlier in 2023 the London Stock Exchange chief executive argued that low CEO pay levels create a “risk” to the UK economy.

“Lobbyists for big business and the financial services industry spent much of 2023 arguing that top earners in Britain aren’t paid enough and that we are too concerned with gaps between the super-rich and everybody else,” the HPC stated. “They think that economic success is created by a tiny number of people at the top and that everybody else has very little to contribute.

“The HPC believes that when politicians listen to these misguided views, it’s unsurprising that we end up with massive inequality, and stagnating living standards for the majority of the population.”

In response to the HPC figures, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Paul Nowak, said that the Conservative party is presiding over and enabling “obscene levels of pay inequality”.

“While working people have been forced to suffer the longest wage squeeze in modern history, city bosses have been allowed to pocket bumper rises and bankers have been given unlimited bonuses,” commented Nowak. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We need an economy that rewards work – not just wealth.

“That means putting workers on company boards to inject some much-needed common sense into boardrooms. It means taxing wealth fairly. And it means a Government that is willing to work with unions and employers to drive up living standards for all.

“Under the Tories it is one rule for the super-wealthy and one rule for everybody else.”

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